Coexist
by soldieroftroy
Summary: There are some things that Tony can't handle. Water, for instance. He hates water, and after Afghanistan, that's no surprise. It is a surprise that he's crippled by his social phobia, so that's just one of the many things he keeps to himself. (Full summary inside)
1. Suffocated

_There are some things that Tony can't handle. Water, for instance. He hates water, and after Afghanistan, that's no surprise. It is a surprise that he's crippled by his social phobia, so that's just one of the many things he keeps to himself. Bruce isn't so good with people either, what with the Other Guy making a mess of things. He kept himself away from society in the interest of safety, but after years of isolation, he's aching for some company. (Can be read as friendship or pre-slash.)_

* * *

Tony Stark wasn't a particularly social man. Sure, he demanded the attention of rooms full of people, crowds of strangers, and business meetings full of crotchety old men with the ease of someone who spent their whole life training to be a public speaker. Words came easily to him and jokes appeared on the fly, easing the tension in even the worst of situations, but when push became brutally acquainted with shove, all Tony wanted was to surround himself in music cranked all the way up and the artificial friends he'd made from scraps in his spare time. The bots kept him sane without making him feel like all the air was being choked from his lungs.

Dummy, You, Butterfingers, and JARVIS. That's all Tony needed—all he wanted, aside from fleeting encounters with strangers and people who called themselves friends. He went to parties, sure, and invariably came away with some sweet blond attached to his arm, but if someone could find record of Tony not getting plastered at one of these events, it would be news to him and the world around. He had the sort of personality that people gravitated toward—or, more likely, he had the sort of money that people gravitated toward.

He found difficulty being serious when he spoke to people, anxieties driven into override, so he cracked jokes and fooled around and tried his very damn best to convince himself that everything was fine (even though he knew, with every fibre of his being, that things were about fifty miles from fine at any given second). He practiced his extempore speeches in his head about a hundred times a day and had to keep a steady supply of whisky on hand so that his tongue wouldn't stick to the roof of his mouth when he was forced to give them. He was drowning, like he was back in that damn cave and they were shoving his head into the basin.

His doctors (read: the one they had locked him in a room with after the press conference announcing the change of direction) called it social anxiety disorder. Tony called it being a fucking toddler and refused to take the doc up on the suggestion of therapy and medication. He'd gone his whole life struggling not to faint because he'd been thrust into the spotlight, he wasn't about to duck out into pills and therapists just because he had a name for it. No, he was going to play it cool and force himself to behave as normal. For Tony, this meant projecting an outgoing personality that wasn't his and pretending that he was thrilled with all the attention thrust onto him.

For a long time, Pepper was the only one Tony felt remotely comfortable around. There was Obie, of course, but Obie was like a surrogate parent since the day Howard and Maria died, and just look at how that turned out for him. Pepper was the only one who could fall asleep in Tony's bed and wake up with him still in it, when hundreds of people before her had been abandoned mere minutes after falling asleep for the safety of the workshop and his bots.

Still, in the end, she proved to be too much and he shoved her away just as forcefully as the rest. He couldn't handle the thought of fucking everything up (as he did every time, without fail) and the panic choked him when he woke up one morning with her legs tangled in his and he couldn't, he just couldn't, and he fled.

JARVIS was already blasting AC/DC's _Hell's Bells_ by the time Tony threw open the door to the third floor from the top of his building, hurling himself headlong into the designs for the newest model of his Iron Man suit. You made some smoothie-fashioned drink of liquefied vegetables (at least, that's what Tony hoped was in it—he could never be certain when it came to You) and Dummy made a mess of the shop trying to make Tony feel better.

He barely even noticed when he had company four hours later.


	2. Barely Breathing

Between a spectacularly skittish mother and one hell of a drunkard for a father, Bruce Banner had much to be desired in the department of healthy relationships growing up. He was a social man at heart—the negative attention he received at home translated to an intense desire to act out in school, to become the lovable class clown. Any attention at all was better than what he was getting: infrequent (albeit loving) words from his mother, books thrown at him by his father, and the occasional lethargic stare from the useless old lump of fur that was their cat. It was only the promise of bottles breaking across his face that kept Bruce from pulling prank after prank and, instead, focusing energy on his studies.

His mother's death hurt more than he'd ever let on. She was the only person he'd ever had the chance to be close with, and what had his monster of a father done? He'd killed her. He'd have killed Bruce, as well, if the boy hadn't fought back so damn hard. He was rather rapidly shipped off to live with his aunt, who was great. At least, Bruce thought in hindsight that she was probably great. After the traumatising clusterfuck that was his childhood, it seemed foolish to invest any energy in becoming close to a woman that he'd probably only know for the year it would take him to finish high school.

By the time he started studying nuclear physics at Desert State University, Bruce felt like he'd explode with all of the things he'd bottled up over the years. Professor Weller was the only person Bruce talked to on a regular basis, but they were by no means close. The first person Bruce could call a friend in his twenty-plus years was Walter Langkowski, a classmate at Penn State. It was slow going, and horrendously awkward for the first month or so, but in the semester that they worked together, Walt managed to teach Bruce what it was like to be properly social.

It wasn't until Betty that Bruce really got the chance to put what he had learned into practice, with coffee and dinner and the whole nine yards. It was nice, having her around. It was better than nice, actually, it was—well. If Bruce had been at all a romantic (which he most certainly was _not_, no matter what Betty would say), he would have called it perfect. There was no other word for it, really. After so many years of loneliness, having even just one person he could share everything with was… intense, to say the least, in the exhilarating way that he had always expected love to be.

But then there was the accident, and Bruce went from a metaphorical timebomb of emotional damage to a literal timebomb of rage and _oh, god, _there was no way he could be around anyone, not when he'd fly into a murderous rampage at the slightest provocation.

So he ran. He hid himself away in the Peruvian Amazon, as far from civilisation as he could manage. He hid himself in the outskirts of Sao Paulo, struggling for social contact while the rest of his rational mind screamed at him to find the Marianas fucking Trench and drown himself there, because there was the possibility that he could destroy the whole city through half a heartbeat's worth of anger. Months later, it was tiny towns in northern Brazil, where he'd rent a room and get a job if only to maintain a semblance of humanity.

After Harlem, he had stowed away on the first ship to cross the Atlantic, choking back dual urges to throw himself into the most populated cities in the world and to keep himself away from every living organism in a two mile radius. His desire for company won out, in the end, and he slowly started sinking back into the world. Brief experiences with sick patients were as much as he'd allow himself, even after months and months of training. He hadn't lost his cool in over a year, but the monster was still there in the back of his head, waiting for lock on his cage to break and allow him to come ripping out.

He hadn't realised how bad it was until SHIELD dragged him back to the States—until he'd been thrust into a situation where he was on a team, and mutual trust was vital, and it had been so easy to just relax for the time being and let himself enjoy Tony's constant company, Steve's check-ins, Thor's food runs… Of course, it didn't last. It_ couldn't_ last, what with Bruce's condition. Save Tony (who really didn't count, if you took into consideration all of Tony's self-destructive habits), he was certain that everyone he came into contact with would become terrified of him—the Other Guy, not him, the _Other Guy_—soon enough.

No. Stop it. That thinking was ridiculous. Bruce needed a friend, damn it, and there were four (five? He still wasn't sure where he stood with Thor, seeing as the Asgardian left almost as soon as the fighting was over) people in their team who seemed perfectly willing to fill that position. He couldn't spend the rest of his life being too invested in _what-ifs_ to form emotional attachments—not when he had a gaping hole in his chest that normal people filled with family and friends. Family, he knew, wouldn't be happening. At the very least, he could manage friends. At this rate, he'd probably be driven to insanity if he didn't find someone to keep him company soon.


	3. Aeration

It's the noise that finally breaks Tony out of his _I'm-fucking-working_ trance, making him spring a solid six inches into the air—he knows exactly what _Given the Dog a Bone _is supposed to sound like (he's heard it five times so far today), and to the extent of his considerable knowledge, Phil Rudd wasn't having a cymbal-throwing fit when he recorded the song. He pretends that it isn't a shock to look up and see Bruce fumbling with a line of test tubes that refuse to cooperate and just stay up on their rack, instead focusing intently on the code he's been trying to fix while his heart returns to a more normal rate.

_Back in Black_ has just started when words manage to claw their way out of his throat. Bruce has apparently given up on the test tubes and is leaning his elbows on the table, rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses. He wants to make a casual comment about how exhausted Bruce looks (which isn't anything new, admittedly, and Tony can't help but think that it's twice as bad that he always seems this ragged), but what comes out is a snicker and a light jibe about how Bruce can't even match the tubes to the right rack. Bruce fires a comment back, and the words hang in the air for a long while.

For some reason, Bruce and Tony always seem to find the same lab at the same time. Some days the interaction is kept to Tony blaring the Clash and Bruce quietly asking JARVIS to turn it down, which goes in a maddening loop through the day but keeps them both awake enough to do what they need to. Other days—better days, really, for both of them—they're just about working on top of each other, managing to get equally involved with each other's projects as they are with their own. The best, hands down, are the ones when Tony doesn't have anything of vital importance to work on and hops onto the table beside Bruce, keeping a running commentary on every result.

It's easier talking to Bruce than it has been with anyone else in a long time. This might be, in part, because he's relatively certain that Bruce won't shrug him off like so many other people in his life are wont to do. It's not like he has many other places to go—essentially, he can stay in comfort and safety or run like a hunted animal, sleeping outside and stealing what he needs to survive. The choices are less than optimal, and the tiny part of Tony (the larger part, really) that is about as self-assured as a high-school geek with a stutter and headgear can't help but feel a sick sort of relief for that. If nothing else, he isn't likely to drive Bruce away any time soon because he has a horrible personality.

The neutral ground and daily exposure slowly but surely shrinks that weak, selfish part of Tony's mind away and replaces it with a calm sort of confidence, chipping away at his insecurities to replace them with something brighter. It only takes two or three weeks before he stops being hyperaware of where his limbs are at any given moment. His stance opens a little, which he doesn't think Bruce notices, and he does things like putting a hand at the small of Bruce's back when leaning across him for something, which he thinks Bruce probably does. A few days after that, the relaxed banter he has with his bots shifts to include Bruce—a miscalculation causes a volatile reaction in the solution Bruce is trying to make and Tony asks if he needs to grab one of the interns to give a crash-course on how elephant toothpaste is made while they clean it up, because clearly Bruce's sloppy mess isn't nearly foamy enough. It isn't much, but it's a step in the right direction.

Bruce, for his part, seems to realise the quiet difficulty Tony has with people. He quickly takes to keeping a watchful eye on Tony while they're out of the lab, steering conversations when he picks up on too much discomfort. The fact that he's coming to know the engineer well enough to spot the signals (the tremble-twitch of his fingers, the shoulders held too rigid, the clenched jaw, the arms crossing over the arc reactor) is a kick in the gut in and of itself. It's been years since he's been this close to someone, and Tony somehow snuck right into the aching wound in his chest with nothing but a nod to acknowledge that _yep, I'm here and your sorry self couldn't get rid of me even if you tried_.

He likes to think he's helping Tony—Bruce needs to rescue him less and less these days, and sometimes it's as easy as stepping a little closer for silent support before Tony is breathing again and the tension melts off. Maybe it's his own desire for company, but the way Tony's eyes scan for him every so often, as though to reassure himself that Bruce is still _right there_, seems to indicate that they need each other in equal amounts. It may not be the healthiest relationship in the world, but who are they kidding? Neither one of them is anywhere close to emotionally stable; pretending that they've both got it all together is an exercise in futility (a Navy SEAL-level exercise, mind you, not one for the average PE class).

It works for them, though. Their broken edges are knitting together, making one entity of Bruce-and-Tony, of Tony-and-Bruce, rather than just being the fractured pieces of two fractured men. The day will come that the mutual wounds will need flexing, when Bruce will need breathing room and other people to lean on, when Tony will need to face his social phobias without the training wheels, but for right here, now?

They're both happy to leave things as they are and to simply coexist.


End file.
